Cities For All: An Interview with Angela Glover Blackwell

Sprawl overruns open space, jams up roads, degrades air quality, and leaves center cities without jobs and services. Policies that fight sprawl could bring new life to cities and suburbs, diversify our neighborhoods, and save the environment.

Angela Glover Blackwell is founder and
CEO of PolicyLink, a national
organization working for economic and social equity. Her work has
centered on revitalizing low-income communities and communities of
color and public-interest law. She recently co-authored Searching
for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America
(2002, WW Norton & Co).

SARAH:

You've been doing policy
work for many years on economic and social issues, especially those
affecting communities of color. What is your vision of the sort of
cities and neighborhoods you are trying to achieve?

ANGELA:

For me, it comes down
to community. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, at a time when
segregation defined where you lived, where you went to school, pretty
much everything about life. For African-American families such as my
own, community was the scaffolding that allowed us to achieve our
visions in a society where we were locked out of the mainstream. By
building strong communities, we were able to create our own pathways to
personal fulfillment.

Having that experience and watching communities change over time is
what drives my work. I have worked to build mentoring programs in
low-income communities to rebuild relationships between caring adults
and children. I've worked to build relationships between faith
institutions and pregnant women so that we could reduce infant
mortality by making sure that the community rallies around pregnant
women.

Community absolutely matters, and that understanding leads to ideas
about the physical environment, the social environment, the spiritual
environment that surrounds children and families and allows them to
have the comfort of knowing that they're not alone and that they can
rely on these structures to create fulfilling pathways.

SARAH:

What role does race play in these issues, and what will it take to undo persistent patterns of housing segregation?

ANGELA:

Over the past 50 years,
we have gotten to the point that where you live literally has become a
proxy for opportunity. We have always had segregated neighborhoods.
However, it used to be that within the city of Detroit or St. Louis or
Cleveland or Philadelphia or Oakland or New York you could identify the
communities that were black and poor, but the places with the good jobs
weren't that far away. You could usually get there on a bus, and people
could aspire to live in a community that they could see while remaining
close to their churches, families, and old neighborhoods.

Sprawl took off during the 1950s. Federal housing policies made
mortgages available to families who were moving to the suburbs but not
to families who were living in black communities. Transportation
dollars went to creating roads out to the suburbs and took funding away
from transit in cities.

There were lots of policies that fueled sprawl—but it was also fueled
by the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, which said
that segregated public education is unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, America missed an opportunity for greatness at that
point. Rather than integrating the schools, people began to move in
droves to the suburbs where they built new enclaves around schools that
were, again, segregated. While we no longer had legal segregation, we
continued??—and continue to this day—to have segregation based on
housing patterns. Our development pattern is intertwined with our
inability, or refusal, to deal effectively and productively with issues
of race and inequality in America.

Those development patterns have taken on a life of their own, so people
today move to the suburbs not to get away from black people but to find
good schools, open space, and affordable housing. The absence of a
commitment to full inclusion has become embedded. One form this takes
is found in the many suburban communities that have exclusionary
housing patterns. Houses must be built on lots of a certain size, or
they must have a certain number of square feet, or two-car garages—all
of which make housing very expensive. Prohibitions on in-law apartments
(smaller housing units out back) and a lack of rental housing make it
difficult for lower-income people to move into these neighborhoods. We
still have a huge income and wealth gap in this country, and the people
who are able to afford expensive houses are more likely to be white.

This exclusionary housing pattern continues the pattern of segregation
and inequality in America. For the country to fulfill the dream of
democracy and inclusion, we have to consciously build in policies based
on full inclusion.

SARAH:

How can we accomplish that?

ANGELA:

There are many things
that people are doing. One is to make sure that every community is a
livable, healthy, and stable community.

Every community ought to have a supermarket, because without one,
people rely on convenience stores and fast food restaurants where they
don't get fresh fruits and vegetables.

Every community should have parks and open space where children can
play, where families can gather, where elderly people can get out, feel
safe, and get exercise.

Every community should have high quality schools, with attractive
school buildings that also function as community centers for adult
education and after-school activities.

We need to make it possible for people to live near job opportunities.
We also need to make sure that people, no matter where they live, can
access opportunity; that means making sure that buses and streetcars
and subway systems can get people from where they live to good jobs.

Here's an example of how to make a community livable. In San Diego, the
Jacobs Family Foundation, in partnership with the residents in the
Diamond neighborhoods, took a brownfield [an unused site that is
contaminated or perceived to be contaminated] in the middle of the
community and transformed it into a community destination point. A
grocery store is the centerpiece of it, but it also has an open-air
amphitheater where the community can share cultural events. It has
places for local entrepreneurs to have businesses; it is adjacent to a
transit stop so people outside the community can come there and shop.

SARAH:

It sounds like your
proposals are modest ones for the wealthiest and most powerful country
in the world. Have you found that you are able to make common cause
with other organizations and other political movements?

ANGELA:The proposals that we
are talking about are modest for a country with the resources of the
United States of America, and because they are modest, what we seek to
do at PolicyLink is to embed the notion of full inclusion in everything
we do. We call that equitable development, which means integrating the
needs of people into investments.

So often, the big development projects have a lot of public dollars in
them, and we want to make sure that public and private investments
produce a double bottom line: economic return for investors and
economic and social returns for people who live in communities.

SARAH:

These are challenging
times, particularly with the sorts of policies coming out of
Washington, DC. What makes you hopeful that the changes that you're
talking about could actually happen?

ANGELA:

These are challenging
times, indeed, and the thing that worries me most is that Americans
seem to have lost faith in government. A nation cannot be strong if the
government is not responsive to the needs of the people. If the people
don't have enough trust in government to invest in it, there cannot be
a national community.

Having said that, the thing that makes me optimistic is that local
government and civic leaders are beginning to realize that we have to
build strong regional communities if we're going to compete in the
global economy. The movement for equitable development, the smart
growth movement, is a real ray of hope.

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